The life-cycle pays off when you consider default templates, the shared data models, multiple components, themeing, and tool integration in the mix. With jMaki we have tried to focus at making the end experience really easy and architecturally sound. As for the lifecycle diagram this is more for widget developers ( a common user would not see this).

Hi,
The Jamki framework is excellent and works well, but there is abit of a learning gap between the traditional javascript event model (i.e onclick , onsubmit e.t.c) and the publish/ subscribe model used in this program.

Can we have a backward compatibility model which allows for simple things like onclick e.t.c with the components ..?

With jMaki you can really easily edit the widgets component.js and add your own listeners (or add them in the template). The other option you have is to give the widget an id and process it like you would any other JavaScript component. See the following blog jMaki Form Processing talks about this more.